The ability to review data-intensive images is a useful tool, e.g., in the medical profession. Many of the issues involving patient health can only be seen or verified by some of the imaging techniques that exist today and cannot be reliably diagnosed by an external exam alone. For example, if a patient's symptoms led a physician to believe that the patient had a cracked rib an x-ray of the area could be used to verify the physician's belief. Often, for many types of medical images, a patient would go to a location remote from the physician's office and have an image taken.
As technology develops, improvements to communication systems and computers have created the ability to transfer large amounts of data relatively quickly over large distances. At the same time, the types of medical images and the amount of data these images contain has continued to grow. Some of the types of medical images currently used by physicians for patient diagnostics include: x-ray, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), electrocardiogram (ECG), ultrasonography, nuclear medicine and digitized radiography. A standard format for medical images is the Digital Imaging Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format. This format allows a common image format to be used among a multitude of different imaging equipment.
With the advances in medical science, more options for medical imagery now exist that a physician can use to assist in patient diagnostics. Sometimes people are sent to multiple locations in order to have different types of images taken. The image would be taken, processed at the location, and then a report would be generated. The report would get back to the physician days later through one or more of a number of different channels such as: the patient returning to the imaging location(s) to pick-up and deliver the image film(s) and report(s) to their physician or the imaging location specialist mailing the report and/or film(s) to the physician. These methods are slow and inefficient.
Teleradiology (which term refers generally to the transmission of digitized medical images) improved upon these purely manual delivery methods in part, by allowing many types of image taking devices to send their images to a central processing station. For example, as shown in FIG. 1, a patient is referred by a physician to imaging center 102. Depending upon the imaging requested, the patient could get an x-ray taken in x-ray imaging room 104, a magnetic resonance image (MRI) taken in MRI room 106 and an ultrasound in ultrasound room 108. These medical images are then forwarded electronically to the film processing lab 110 for processing. Upon completion of this process, the image films and any associated information either needs to be picked up and hand carried or mailed to a physician's office 112. Thus teleradiology techniques initially allowed a patient to get all of the imaging needed performed in one location, as well as getting the reports generated at one location, but did not improve the steps involved with image report delivery to the patient's physician.
A next logical step in the usage of medical images is to allow remote access to images and their associated reports for physicians and/or patients. Some of the advantages associated with such an improvement would be a faster turn around time on diagnosing patient problems and cost reductions. Some challenges associated with this step of allowing remote access are privacy/security concerns, format of the medical image, quality of the image, notification and ensuring that the remote station had the correct capabilities to view the image(s).
In conjunction with remote medical image viewing, notification to the physician and/or patient that report delivery occurred is also desirable. One method of notification has been described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,934,698 B2 filed on Dec. 20, 2000, entitled “Medical Image Management System” and which is hereafter referred to as the “698 application”. In the 698 application, upon completion of the computations related to the image, an email notification is sent to the person submitting the request or via a text message to a physician's pager. However, some limitations still exist when using the systems or methods described in this patent. For example, if the physician was not close to his computer he could not view the images immediately. Moreover, there is limited to no ability to interact with the sender of the notification to query the status of other requests. Additionally, the difficulties associated with remotely viewing medical images also arise in other fields, e.g., geology, astronomy, and aerial imaging in which data-intensive images are recorded and analyzed.
Accordingly, there is a need for more efficient systems and methods for both viewing data-intensive images at remote locations and supplying notification of the readiness of such images for viewing to the relevant individuals.